Video conferencing is an established method of simulated face-to-face collaboration between remotely located participants. A video image of a remote environment is broadcast onto a local display, allowing a local user to see and talk to one or more remotely located participants.
Social interaction during face-to-face collaboration is an important part of the way people work. There is a need to allow people to have effective social interaction in a simulated face-to-face meeting over distance. Key aspects of this are nonverbal communication between members of the group and a sense of being co-present in the same location even though some participants are at a remote location and only seen via video. Many systems have been developed that try to enable this. However, key problems have prevented them from being successful or widely used.
For instance, social nonverbal communication refers to the multiple ways humans gather information about what others are thinking and feeling and communicating using body language, facial expressions, position in a group and the activities performed. Many researchers from cognitive to perceptual scientists have studied the means by which humans have the ability to look at a group of people and see their activities and expressions and from these, develop powerful feelings of what the people in the group are thinking and feeling. The environment is a key part of enabling people to “read” other people. Many video conferencing systems fail to take this environment factor into account in their implementation. Therefore, there is a need to preserve these cognitive and perceptual clues during video conferencing sessions.
For the reasons stated above, and for other reasons that will become apparent to those skilled in the art upon reading and understanding the present specification, there is a need in the art for alternative video conferencing methods.